Facebook's Freefall

Sometimes stories are so big that it seems ridiculous to talk about anything else. And in tech right now, Facebook is one of those stories. Just when you think it can’t get any more crazy, it does.

I wrote a post over the weekend that had been in the back of my head for a while. Honestly, since the visit-a-hurricane-disaster-zone-in-VR fiasco last October. But things have gotten so much worse since then. And keep getting worse. It’s really quite incredible. It’s not just that Facebook doesn’t know how to respond, it’s like they must know what to do because they clearly know how to do the exact opposite of what they should do – and that’s what they decide to do each time.

This weekend’s post was a continuation of this one. And I think there will be one more that’s related – but less about Facebook, and more about the industry as a whole.

I don’t know how this ends. But I’m pretty confident at this point that it ends with Mark Zuckerberg standing, hand raised, in front of a bunch of elected officials…

In an effort to cleanse our brains of the Facebook situation for a moment, this post by Steve Francis is well worth a read. Honestly, even if you’re not really into basketball. It’s just so raw and great storytelling. This is The Players’ Tribune (disclosure: a GV investment) at its absolute best.

Tom Critchlow with a plea to get back to the “olden” days of blogging. I often think about this myself – as I know many of us do who have been blogging for a long time. There’s a desire to get back to when things were simple, and we could write about anything in a casual manner, just because. These days, things keep getting more and more formal. Undoubtedly because blogging has merged with writing/reporting in general. But there’s no reason both can’t coexist.

Speaking of old-school blogging, here’s Jason Kottke on the twentieth anniversary of his blog:

I’ve been reading back through the early archives (which I wouldn’t recommend), and it feels like excavating down through layers of sediment, tracing the growth & evolution of the web, a media format, and most of all, a person. On March 14, 1998, I was 24 years old and dumb as a brick. Oh sure, I’d had lots of book learning and was quick with ideas, but I knew shockingly little about actual real life. I was a cynical and cocky know-it-all. Some of my older posts are genuinely cringeworthy to read now: poorly written, cluelessly privileged, and even mean spirited. I’m ashamed to have written some of them.

But had I not written all those posts, good and bad, I wouldn’t be who I am today, which, hopefully, is a somewhat wiser person vectoring towards a better version of himself. What the site has become in its best moments — a slightly highfalutin description from the about page: “[kottke.org] covers the essential people, inventions, performances, and ideas that increase the collective adjacent possible of humanity” — has given me a chance to “try on” hundreds of thousands of ideas, put myself into the shoes of all kinds of different thinkers & creators, meet some wonderful people (some of whom I’m lucky enough to call my friends), and engage with some of the best readers on the web (that’s you!), who regularly challenge me on and improve my understanding of countless topics and viewpoints.

I think this is just an awesome way to look back/think about the corpus of work he’s created over the past two decades.

It’s incredible just how much work (and thought) is going on behind-the-scenes at Netflix to “help” (some may say “guide”) you decide what to watch. You read something like this and you’re not at all surprised that traditional Hollywood is having trouble keeping up.